The recent estimate by the World Bank says that the number of people in India living in extreme poverty declined from 344 million in 2011-12 to 75 million in 2022-23. That is 269 million people crossing the threshold of extreme poverty over eleven years. That is quite impressive and laudable.

Extreme poverty has a technical definition in terms of the purchasing power-adjusted poverty line updated to 2021. It is now at 3 dollars per day. This update was necessitated for mythological consistency, a closer connection with another related concept of poverty called the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and also to take cognisance of India’s own improvement in the accuracy of collecting consumption data through an upgraded survey. (More about MPI as calculated by Niti Aayog later).

In non-technical terms, the World Bank’s extreme poverty means individuals have such a low income that it cannot even meet their basic needs of food, clean water, shelter and basic healthcare.

The manifestation of such a low income is chronic hunger or undernourishment, lack of access to sanitation and no access to basic primary education or primary healthcare. In an extreme form it also means the prevalence of starvation deaths. By these rather grim benchmarks, India’s extreme poverty rate now stands at 5.3 per cent of the population.

As an aside, one should note that since India has not had a population census since 2011, the exact number on the population or the denominator of the poverty ratio is unavailable. But one can make reasonable estimates. The world has around 838 million living in extreme poverty, of which India’s 75 million make up 9 per cent.........

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